(1) SPACE:1999.  In The Telegraph. Samira Ahmed, a BBC  newsreader and journalist (Front Row, News Watch, etc), remembers when “Space: 1999 was Britain’s answer to Star Trek – until it wasn’t”.

The show was a second attempt by Gerry Anderson and Sylvia Anderson, Thunderbirds husband-and-wife creators, to break away from Supermarionation puppetry into adult human drama, following the cancellation of their first live-action series, UFO, after just one season. With the high-gloss production values of its main backer, ITC Entertainment’s Lew Grade, who gave us The Prisoner and The Avengers, when it began shooting in 1973, Space: 1999 was the most expensive British TV show ever made.

Well, yes, actually.

It can be hard to explain to people who didn’t grow up watching Space: 1999 just what a seminal experience it was. Originally broadcast in the UK between 1975 and 1977, it had a captivating mixture of futuristic design, beautiful planetary skyscapes by future Oscar-winning special effects designer Brian Johnson, and existential, often philosophical, horror….

…Only two series were shot, and they differed wildly. Arguing about which is better is like debating whether the Sean Connery or Roger Moore Bond films are superior. We all know, really – but you’ve got to admit there was some great fun in The Spy Who Loved Me and Moonraker. So it is with Space: 1999 series two, which comes to Rewind TV this week. Although I showed up to Celebrity Mastermind in a borrowed season one costume (as awkwardly form-hugging as I’d feared) to prove my gravitas, as a child it was series two that fuelled my games, where we turned our fold-out sofa beds into little Eagle command module cockpits and climbed inside for adventure, and I took on the role of Maya – alien princess with exotic eyebrows and metamorphic powers.

Space: 1999 was a kind of follow-up to UFO (set in 1980), which featured humans on the moon manning an early-warning station for alien attack. For the new show, this was reimagined as a quasi-military and scientific research station, now called Moonbase Alpha. The opening episode saw the moon hurled out of Earth’s orbit by a nuclear explosion (memo to Elon Musk: storing nuclear waste up there is not a great idea), with the 300 or so Alphans sent hurtling uncontrollably across space, looking for a new planet to call home, but mostly encountering hostile aliens.

Made with the American market in mind, real-life Hollywood couple Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, fresh from Mission: Impossible, led the cast as Commander Koenig and Chief Medical Officer Dr Helena Russell. But despite strong storylines, exquisite production values, and an impressively diverse crew, series one wasn’t picked up by a major US network, causing panic at ITC Entertainment. It was widely felt to be too dark, although if we’re really honest, its leading couple lacked charisma….

(2) LAST WORD ON TYPOS. [Item by Lew Wolkoff.] Here’s the story of a typo gone wrong that I learned in an English Lit class in college that I thought you might appreciate..

 “Why is a raven like a writing desk,” one of the characters in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland asks. Lewis Carroll wrote the scene with no intention of answering the question. In point of fact, he had no answer. Finally, after years of badgering by his fans, he produced this answer:

 “Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is nevar put with the wrong end in front!”.

 The word “nevar” is “put with the wrong end in front.” Written backward, it in r-a-v-e-n. It’s a deliberate typo by Carroll. And it didn’t appear in print as planned because the proofreader caught and corrected it!.

(3) CHRIS BARKLEY MEDICAL UPDATE. Chris says, “Two days removed from cataract and glaucoma surgery… Here’s Today’s ‘PROOF OF LIFE’ Photo.”

Chris Barkley after surgery.

(4) ONE FELLOW’S BALLOT. If you’re interested in what’s on Rich Horton’s Hugo ballot, he’s happy to tell you: “The Good Stuff: 2025” at Strange at Ecbatan.

… I read a dozen or more SF/F novels this year, and I feel very good about my nomination list — noting that I read several more that I’d have been happy to nominate! In other categories I’m to a great extent nominating favorites. Even so, for short fiction Editor — how in the world have neither Jonathan Strahan nor Scott Andrews won a Hugo!! Seriously!…

(5) BOW WOW LAW. The New York Times reports “Vogue Is Suing a Dog Fashion Magazine. Guess What It’s Called.” (Behind a paywall.) And it sells only a hundred copies an issue. Guess what that sales figure reminds me of.

A recent cover of Dogue, a canine fashion magazine, featured an Italian greyhound wearing an evening gown, an opera glove on each paw. Several pages in, a nattily dressed labradoodle showed off a collection of trench coats.

Readers find this sort of thing charming. The media company Condé Nast does not.

In December, Condé Nast filed a lawsuit in federal court arguing that Dogue had infringed on its trademark for Vogue, the human-centric fashion magazine published since 1892.

Lawyers for the company wrote in their complaint that Dogue’s logo was “obviously intended” to confuse customers by suggesting a relationship between the magazines. The continued publication of Dogue was a blow to Vogue’s reputation, they added, and was “likely to damage Condé Nast irreparably.”

Now, the typically harmonious world of dog fashion is gearing up for a legal showdown that Olga Portnaya, the creator and editor in chief of Dogue, believes is about far more than who gets to photograph a vizsla in a turtleneck.

“Art and culture have always evolved through reinterpretation and dialogue,” Ms. Portnaya, a graphic designer and photographer who started Dogue in 2019, said in an interview. “For me, this is a larger fight: I’m not just fighting for my own work and our community, but for other independent creators.”

She said she was astonished that Condé Nast was so interested in confronting her magazine, a one-woman editorial operation that sells fewer than 100 copies per issue. The complaint demands that Ms. Portnaya pay Condé Nast unspecified damages and deliver all copies of Dogue to the company “for destruction.”…

… In a complaint filed in federal court, lawyers for Condé Nast claimed that Dogue’s logo was “obviously intended” to confuse customers by suggesting a relationship between the magazine and Vogue.

The magazine is offered free online and sold at a single newsstand in Beverly Hills, Calif. Each issue features a four-legged cover star beneath serif text that reads “Dogue,” placed roughly where the Vogue mark appears on Condé Nast’s magazine. Between spreads of canine couture, readers might encounter an interview with the actor Kevin Costner about his English Labrador, Bobby, who enjoys eating carrots. (Ms. Portnaya writes most of the magazine’s articles under the byline Oli Port.)…

(6) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

March 22, 1931 — William Shatner, 95.

By Paul Weimer: William Shatner. The face that launched a hundred soap operas. 

I find it interesting that like B5 would find out thirty years later, Star Trek’s first shot at a crew and a leading man, Jeffrey Hunter, wasn’t quite what a viewing public particularly wanted in a leading man of a space opera SF series. Poor Michael O’Hare and Jeffrey Hunter both weren’t quite right to be the full-on leading actors for such a series. 

But like Bruce Boxleitner three decades later, William Shatner proved to be.  I mean, sure, lots of Spock fans out there, McCoy fans, and other characters. And the whole “trio” of Kirk-Spock-McCoy has been documented to enormous detail. But it is William Shatner’s complex Captain Kirk, who was more cerebral and outwitting of his opponents than you remember, more nuanced, more interesting than the flanderized stereotype that has been parodied to the moon and back ever made him out to be. Sure, his diction and acting were, charitably melodramatic, but that is a feature, not a bug that got him through the series, and seven movies. 

Outside of genre space, he did shows like T J Hooker, and Rescue 911, and Boston Legal (although the fourth wall breaking Boston Legal might actually BE a genre show. I leave the comments to decide that). He’s done music (oddly, that doesn’t make him unique among the TOS crew). He was the voice of Priceline.com in its early days on the Internet. He co-wrote the TekWar novels. He breeds horses. (Wonder why he is horse riding in Star Trek Generations? Now you know.) 

You might think that “Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” would be my favorite non-Star-Trek genre performance Shatner has done. And you would be almost right. It is a classic in paranoia, perception, fear, and it does show that his acting style does have range, and ability and even with his unusual cadence, it can work in a situation like this. The episode itself is a masterpiece and Shatner’s performance is a big part of that.

But I like “Nick of Time” a bit more. It’s a more hopeful and positive story, as we see Shatner as part of a married couple who wind up briefly in thrall to a fortune telling machine that seems to tell the future — but really just makes people dependent on its easy, cryptic answers. The utter triumph of the episode as Shatner and his wife break free of their dependency is enough to make you cheer…until you see the coda, and see a couple who have not been so fortunate, or possessing as much fortitude as Shatner’s Don S. Carter and Patricia Breslin’s Pat Carter finally manage to show.

And Shatner has been to space.

Get a life? William Shatner, in and out of Star Trek, certainly has.

Shatner on horseback

(7) MEMORY LANE.

[Written by Cat Eldridge.]

March 22, 1995 – Sliders

Thirty-one years ago on FOX, the Sliders series first aired this evening. Created by Tracy Tormé and Robert K. Weiss, it would air on that network for three years before moving to Sci Fi for another two years. As a consequence of that it was first produced in Vancouver before being finally being so done in Los Angeles. 

Befitting a cross-time series,  it had an expansive cast led by the brothers of Jerry and Charlie  O’Connell along with Cleavant Derricks, Sabrina Lloyd, John Rhys-Davies, Kari Wuhrer, Robert Floyd and Tembi Locke with Derricks being the only cast member to stay with the series throughout its entire run.

There has also been gossip among Martin fans that this series was inspired by George R.R. Martin’s 1992 ABC pilot Doorways but everyone involved said that it was not.

So how was the reception at the time? Not good. The Los Angeles Time was typical when it said “Now comes ‘Sliders,’ a banal bore of a mishmash adventure series starring Jerry O’Connell as a genius grad student named Quinn Mallory, who discovers a way to visit parallel Earths by whooshing himself through a space portal known as a ‘wormhole.’ It beats studying.”  

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Brevity tries a different way to wake a beauty. 
• Crankshaft shares art tips. 
• Lio becomes an importer. 
• Mother Goose and Grimm celebrate Ohio. 
• Reality Check gives fine art a playful turn.
• Paul Noth calls the computer repairman.

(9) DOCTOR WHO. [Item by Steven French.] A heart-warming piece on how David Tennant’s Dr Who helped the writer connect with her autistic son: “I was struggling to understand my autistic son – until we watched an episode of Doctor Who” in the Guardian.

The film Elf is a no-go in our house. My son interprets it as the psychological horror story of a man who is telling the truth but is constantly disbelieved. He loves The Traitors and rewatches entire series of it – knowing who the traitors are gives him an autonomy and comfort watching the game. Any other kind of conflict on screen and he’ll leave the room or wind it forward. I tried to explain that there are no stories without conflict. It made no difference.

My son is autistic and has ADHD – what’s sometimes referred to as AuDHD. We’ve always called him “fizzy”. He’s often the noisiest person in a room but hates too much noise. He’s incredibly sociable and wants so desperately to be part of the fun but finds the fun stressful. I had never seen anyone like him represented on screen.

And then I put on Doctor Who. It was a punt – my son was eight and he liked science. We went in at the David Tennant era – beginning with the episode The Christmas Invasion, where the Doctor doesn’t wake up till a third of the way through the episode. Suddenly there, standing in his pyjamas with a big boyish grin, was Tennant, describing a frightening alien with a weapon as a “big fella”. My son grinned back at the screen. When Tennant’s Doctor arrives properly, he barely stops talking or moving. He’s sword-fighting, then joking, then forgiving – and then he kills the baddy with a satsuma. All while repeating certain phrases to himself. My son laughed in recognition (he often repeats phrases to himself). He turned to me, eyes wide.

“He’s like me!” he said.

“You mean funny? Yes, you are very funny, luv.”

“No,” he insisted. “He’s fizzy. Like me.”…

(11) VIDEO OF THE DAY. [Item by Mike Kennedy.] The Internet is a, um, magical, um, well, not exactly a place per se. But it turns out, you can try to become magical for real using that, um, let’s just call it a place. Ryan George tells how “I Enrolled in Wizard School (Online)”.

I did not receive an owl. Not a snowy owl, not a budget owl, not even a morally questionable burrowing owl. So instead of attending wizard school the traditional way, I enrolled in an online course that promised to help me reclaim my magic. In this video, I take a real wizarding course on the internet, learn about alchemy, magical staffs, chakras, telepathy, and the importance of keeping your wand clean, and attempt to determine whether I am now legally considered a wizard. If you enjoy watching a grown man take online wizard classes very seriously, welcome.

[Thanks to Cat Eldridge, SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Lew Wolkoff, Jo Fletcher, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]